George Plimpton

A few weeks before entering the ring at Stillman’s Gym against Archie (the Mongoose) Moore, George Plimpton ordered a “wildcat” drink called Crashweight Formula #7. Plimpton would need whatever bulking up he could get in order to survive the rough attentions of the light-heavyweight champion of the world. “I am built rather like a bird of the stiltlike, wader variety—the avocets, limpkins, and herons,” he wrote. “I can slide my watch up my arm almost to the elbow.” On the day of the three-round exhibition, in 1959, Moore flicked uncertainly at Plimpton’s most patrician part: “He jabbed and followed with a long lazy left hook that fetched up against my nose and collapsed it slightly. It began to bleed.” The dizzying pain was short-lived, but the essay that followed, “Three with Moore,” ranks high in the annals of Plimptoniana.

George Plimpton, who died last week at his town house, on East Seventy-second Street near the river, was a serious man of serious accomplishments who just happened to have more fun than a van full of jugglers and clowns. He was game for anything and made a comic art of his Walter Mitty dreams and inevitable failures. Borrowing from Paul Gallico, a sportswriter of an earlier generation, who tried to box Jack Dempsey, Plimpton deepened the idea of “participatory journalism,” quarterbacking the Detroit Lions for a book called “Paper Lion,” pitching to Willie Mays and Ernie Banks for “Out of My League,” golfing with Sam Snead for “The Bogey Man.” In further pursuit of material, he played basketball under Red Auerbach in Boston and triangle (Mahler’s Fourth) under Leonard Bernstein in New York. He flew on a trapeze with the Flying Apollos, and took a bullet from John Wayne in “Rio Lobo.” None, in any field but the literary, would call him skilled. Nick Pietrosante, a running back with the Lions, once told me, “As soon as he put on his shorts in training camp, with that oblong body and his dangling legs, you knew George had no ability whatsoever. He was a good guy, though. He had that Harvard accent . . . so I don’t think he’d been knocked on his ass too many times. He was gutsy.”

Plimpton did not necessarily need to be. He was born to a wealthy New York family. His grandfather was the founder of the Ginn publishing company and a philanthropist. His father was one of the founding partners of the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. One of his forebears, Benjamin (Beast) Butler, was the governor-general of New Orleans and told Abraham Lincoln that he would agree to be his running mate “only if you die within three weeks.” Plimpton’s bearing and accent, his bonhomie, were such that Muhammad Ali, never good with names, used to call him “Kennedy.” And for good reason. There was, on his C.V., St. Bernard’s, Phillips Exeter, Harvard, Cambridge, and a wealth of connections everywhere in publishing, finance, social life. “In dime-store-novel terms,” Plimpton said, “I had a perfectly pleasant, non-unhappy childhood.”

But Plimpton made something of his luck. He was generous with it. His good fortune became ours. While he was on vacation in Paris fifty years ago, he and a few friends—including Peter Matthiessen and William Styron—began talking about starting a literary magazine. They discussed the possibility of publishing the journal on birch bark and calling it the Druid’s Home Companion, but paper and The Paris Review prevailed.

The Paris Review hardly proved a rich boy’s venture, a lark before law school. For decades, in fact, Plimpton kept the Review going in his own house, with the help of an ever-changing team of hardworking editors and interns. Unlike Partisan Review, which came with a distinct political purpose, or Evergreen Review, which championed the Beats, The Paris Review was, and remains, an utterly catholic magazine, publishing many young writers, like V. S. Naipaul, Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, and Terry Southern, who had little in common besides their enormous promise. The parade of the promising never ceased. Plimpton also devised the Review’s most distinctive innovation, the extended literary interview, and conducted two of the earliest and best himself, with E. M. Forster and with Ernest Hemingway. There was always an air of good humor and celebration about the magazine, not least because it was an extension of its editor’s personality. The parties Plimpton threw at his place were known for the beauty of the very tall young women and for the fierce undercurrent of literary competition. “All those authors,” Norman Mailer once said, “myself included, walking rigidly through that packed room toward the drinks, our heads erect, only our eyes swivelling sideways to identify the enemy.”

The next party Plimpton was going to throw is scheduled for October 14th, a gala dinner honoring The Paris Review on the occasion of its fiftieth birthday. It will be held at Cipriani, near Grand Central Terminal. The restaurant is a vast and vaulted room, a former bank, and holds hundreds, but it is not nearly large enough to contain the readers and writers who owe so much to the adventures and intelligence of George Plimpton.

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